Tracing the Borders of Spanish Horror Cinema and Television

Jorge Marí, Jorge Marí

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351858502
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

This critical anthology sets out to explore the boom that horror cinema and TV productions have experienced in Spain in the past two decades. It uses a range of critical and theoretical perspectives to examine a broad variety of films and filmmakers, such as works by Alejandro Amenábar, Álex de la Iglesia, Pedro Almodóvar, Guillermo del Toro, Juan Antonio Bayona, and Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza. The volume revolves around a set of fundamental questions: What are the causes for this new Spanish horror-mania? What cultural anxieties and desires, ideological motives and practical interests may be behind such boom? Is there anything specifically "Spanish" about the Spanish horror film and TV productions, any distinctive traits different from Hollywood and other European models that may be associated to the particular political, social, economic or cultural circumstances of contemporary Spain?

Part I The (Postmodern) Gothic

1 Trapped in the House of Mirrors

The Others as a Transnational Postmodern Gothic Thriller

Santiago Juan-Navarro

The settings of Alejandro Amenábar’s first three films (Tesis / Thesis [1996], Abre los ojos / Open Your Eyes [1997], and The Others [2001]) refer to the characteristic universe of the thriller. The characters wander about in sinuous—and often claustrophobic and threatening—spaces that increase their anxiety and, by extension, that of the spectator. The secret corridors of a university, a video library plagued by abject images, a prison that is at once physical and mental, or a haunted house into which sunlight cannot penetrate—these are spaces that connect with the best tradition of the film thriller, a tradition in which the labyrinth is the central metaphor not only of the characters’ condition and worldview, but also of the structure of the film itself. As in classic labyrinths, Amenábar’s first productions create dead ends that entrap the spectator. Their plots are complex, digressive, and twisting, filled with unexpected turns and tangles.

Formally, the structures of his first three feature films adhere to the same pattern (prologue, development, and epilogue) that materializes in similar ways. In all three films, the narrative is set in motion with a black screen and a voiceover that addresses the characters (but also us, the viewers). This prologue works as a narrative prolepsis that introduces the main topics, hints at their mysteries, and announces some of their clues. The central body of each film presents characters who are struggling with a mystery that they are attempting to solve and a plot that they are trying to overcome. In the process, they discover clues not only to the enigma they face, but, more importantly, to their own identity. They achieve this major insight only at the very end of the film, in the epilogue. In that final segment, the movie’s central themes are revisited and some of the remaining pieces of the puzzle are solved.

This narrative formula recurs in all of Amenábar’s thrillers, which have enjoyed significant international success. From the shower of Goya awards that recognized Tesis, his opera prima, to his blockbuster The Others, widely distributed in the United States, his thrillers have been recognized by both critics and audiences, confirming over and over that it is possible to make good auteur cinema without ignoring the demands of the market. Amenábar’s cinematography has grown increasingly refined, while his appeal to large audiences has multiplied, reaching its peak in The Others.¹ This success can arguably be explained by his mastery of the mechanics of suspense. In fact, suspense is the structuring element of his early productions: when viewing those first films, the spectator remained ‘suspended’ between questions and answers, anticipations and resolution, the hidden and the revealed, the mundane and the marvelous, pain and pleasure.

It seems appropriate that Amenábar’s thriller trilogy concluded with a US-French-Spanish co-production that paid homage to his most admired Hollywood models and that contained all the characteristic ingredients of suspense. While he had freely experimented with the slasher film genre in Tesis and with science fiction in Abre los ojos, in The Others, Amenábar explores the supernatural thriller in its postmodern gothic mode. These variations on the ‘thriller’ theme indicate that, rather than being a genre proper, the thriller can be considered as a metagenre that incorporates several other genres under its umbrella (Rubin 4). The term can thus be used to refer to productions that are very diverse but that nevertheless display a common feature: the use of excess at all possible levels, but especially of fear, suspense, action, vertigo, and movement. This amalgamation of excessive feelings produces ambivalent responses in the spectator, who simultaneously experiences distress and pleasure, attraction and loathing. Above all, thrillers, like roller coasters, aim at debilitating our emotional stability, inducing a strong sensation of vulnerability that paradoxically can end up being extremely pleasant. The etymology of the word underscores these implications: to thrill = “to cause to feel a sudden intense sensation,” while thrall = “one who is held in bondage.” These definitions convey the aggressive and sadomasochistic nature of this narrative mode and suggest its impact on the audience (Rubin 6–7).

The Others in Context

A transnational co-production like The Others, set in foreign soil and shot in English with international actors, has to be understood within the transnational framework of Spanish cinema at the beginning of the 21^st century. Like its characters, the film itself inhabits a historical and spatial ‘limbo,’ which makes it difficult to ascertain its Spanishness (or at least, to do so in traditional terms). As Marvin D’Lugo has pointed out, “the lack of specificity in the story, setting, and cast of these films suggests the inevitable dissolution of the nation as an operative category for classifying film productions” (39). Despite these classification challenges, film critics, especially those in the Anglo-American and French academia, have struggled to associate some of its themes and vicissitudes with contemporary trends in ‘national’ cinema. For example, Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz has gone further than most in interpreting the The Others as a “historical allegory” of the cultural and historic trauma of the nation. To make this claim he traces daring and suggestive (although at times far-fetched) analogies to films by Víctor Erice, Luis Buñuel, José Luis Borau, Carlos Saura, and Guillermo del Toro. While, in some cases, those allegories may be somehow explicit, or as Acevedo-Muñoz calls them “pragmatic” (e.g., the case of the Spanish tradition of mothers and monsters in contemporary culture), they are better aligned to as “unconscious allegories”—a slippery concept that is not always well suited to talk about a filmmaker who is anchored in American (not Spanish) cinema. The 1990’s generation of young filmmakers—Alejandro Amenábar, Isabel Coixet, Chus Gutiérrez, Agustín Díaz Yanes, Julio Medem, and Gracia Querejeta—looked for models in global cinema and thus abandoned the metaphorical style and political obsessions of its predecessors. As Rosanna Maule has observed, these directors “have moved into a broader framework of culturally oriented cinema, one that is more in keeping with contemporary Spanish society and the new audio-visual market” (113). A case in point is Amenábar, a master in fusing Hollywood genres with Spanish cinema’s style and approaches (Berthier 23).

Equally contentious are Acevedo-Muñoz’s claims of the film’s subscription to a national cinematic tradition due to anecdotal details regarding its reception and exhibition. Even though the film was shot in English, Acevedo-Muñoz observes, it was released in Spain in a Spanish dubbed version and the film became “officially nationalized” by receiving numerous Spanish Goya Awards and by becoming the highest grossing film of the year at the box office” (212). In fact, all foreign-language films, and especially Hollywood movies, have always been dubbed in Spanish since Franco’s years² and the nominations of The Others for multiple Goya Awards was also the origin of a bitter controversy. Spanish filmmaker Vicente Aranda, whose film Juana La Loca, represented Spain at the Oscars that year, did not attend the Goya ceremony and he furiously blamed the US industry for attempting to appropriate the Goya Awards. Aranda claimed that The Others was a foreign film that should have not even been considered by the Spanish Academy of Cinematography. This claim was echoed by conservative newspapers, such as ABC and El Mundo, which also questioned the “Spanishness” (españolidad) of Amenábar’s film based in the language of production and its international cast.³ These consideration notwithstanding, The Others, received most of the Goyas, except the Goya for Best Actress, which interestingly went to Pilar López de Ayala (the protagonist of Juana La Loca), helping somehow to appease Aranda’s anger. Amenábar always kept a cautious distance throughout this controversy. When questioned about this by the media, he did not go beyond some ironical remarks. Regarding the language in which it was produced he commented: “this is a movie that takes place in England; it would have obviously made no sense to shoot it in Swedish”. As for its Spanishness, he was even more categorical: “Ask Hacienda (the Spanish IRS) if The Others is Spanish or not!” All these observations point to a new concept of the ‘national cinema’ category, which can no longer be redistricted to the same invariable cultural marks or stylistic traits that had been used to categorize cinematic traditions until very recently. The Others is a transnational film that originated in Spain, shot by a Spanish filmmaker on Spanish soil with, partly at least, Spanish capital, in spite of the caveats expressed by critics. The fact that, along with Agora (2009), it is a film that lacks the stereotypical traits of Spanish cinema does not preclude considering it as part of a new development within that tradition, one in which “the return to the transparent conventions associated with genre cinema goes together with modest auteurist pretensions” (Sánchez-Biosca 367). Although national traits may be present in the film, they are subdued by a transnational and globalized aesthetics that does not detract from the merits of the project. As Paul Julian Smith pointed out in his enthusiastic review for Sight & Sound: “Perhaps the most uncanny miracle of this terrific thriller is that Amenábar has materialized a European art movie in the heart of darkness that is the US film industry” (53). This transnational project was shortly followed with Mar adentro / The Sea Inside (2004), “a highly localist feature” (Smith, “Auteurism” 145) inspired by the true story of Ramón Sampedro, which put to rest the futile polemic about the españolidad of Amenábar’s cinema, while “reconciling Spanish film audiences with Spanishness” (Maule 118), as is proven by its national success.

The Others is, above all, an exercise in style, more concerned with the formal mastery of a new hybrid genre (the postmodern gothic thriller) than in making political, moral, or historical statements. Like other Spanish filmmakers who emerged in the 1990s, Amenábar crafts his films within a trans-cultural dialectics that is indebted to a highly international conception of picture making. It is in this sense that he has helped to expand the concept of a national tradition, rather than breaking away with it.

Reflexive Structure and Intertextuality

Like Tesis and Abre los ojos, The Others contains a metatextual subplot in which the film reflects on reality and fiction, life and death, nature and representation. The film opens with the voice of Grace, the protagonist. She is preparing to tell a story: that of the film we are about to see. She begins by recounting the myth of the world’s creation according to the Judeo-Christian tradition. The film’s genesis is thus identified with that of the universe and, throughout the movie, many elements will suggest that the world inhabited by Grace and her family is not truly a slice of life but a fiction in which the characters will become progressively more aware of their fictitious condition. To highlight this baroque reflexive framework even further, the opening credits are displayed over the image of a book that contains the fiction that the spectator is about to see: two children in an old house illuminated by candles, a woman placing a key in a lock, a child pointing with horror to something off-screen, a marionette of a fallen angel, another child shouting in bed. The last drawing, depicting an old mansion as viewed from the edge of a lake, fades into the image of the real house. This metamorphosis is the first in a series of hints that accentuate the film’s liminality and its fluctuation between the real and the apparent, the natural and the supernatural, and wakefulness and dreams. Through this mise en abyme of the utterance,⁴ which foretells important elements of the plot, we are placed in the peculiar geography of the film, a space ruled by a darkness on which characters are projected and on which sounds explode, a space that is none other than the scene of cinematic fiction.

Immediately after the film’s self-conscious prologue, we witness Grace’s awakening, although those familiar with Amenábar’s Abre los ojos will wonder if what is depicted from this point on is her real life or her dream. Until the very end, the audience remains suspicious of the true nature of events. In any case, the subsequent images confirm the film’s reflexive nature: Like actors at a theater, the servants arrive at the house and Grace proceeds to assign them roles. We note that the gardener, Mr. Tuttle, displays continual insecurity regarding his role and relies on Mrs. Mills, the housekeeper, to remind him of his tasks.⁵ The tics of the British comedian Eric Sykes, who plays Mr. Tuttle, provide a comic touch to the metatextual subplot.

After the introductions, we are presented with the setting: the old house that refers us not only to the characteristic realm of gothic fiction but to the archetypal space of cinema, as well. As with the movie theater where we are viewing these images, the haunted house must be kept in the dark; otherwise the health of the photosensitive children who inhabit it could be jeopardized, in the same way that the cinematic illusion would be endangered were someone to turn on the lights in the theater. All the events in the plot take place within the confines of the house; the only exceptions are Grace’s two excursions to the area immediately surrounding the mansion, and both of these take her right back to the house itself. The characters in this fiction have no escape beyond the universe of fiction itself. The protagonist’s only attempt to flee is immediately aborted by a mysterious fog that prevents her from seeing what is beyond the house. Her initiation journey is not so much outward as inward. It is a journey of self-realization that ends only when she comes to recognize and accept her “unreal” condition.

When The Others premiered in the United States in August of 2001, both critics and audiences immediately pointed to its surprising similarities with another supernatural thriller, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999), which had been released a short time before. Like Amenábar’s film, The Sixth Sense is a ghost story told from the point of view of the ghost, who also ignores his spectral condition. It is only at the end of these films that we, the audience, discover the protagonist’s ghostly nature, and we do so at the same time as do the characters themselves. The similarity between the final resolutions of the riddles in both films is striking. The most direct influences in The Others, however, are not to be found in Shyamalan’s film but in the classics of the genre to which Amenábar has often referred: on the one hand, films about haunted houses, such as The Changeling (1980), and on the other, adaptations of Henry James’ novel The Turn of the Screw (1898) and, especially, The Innocents (1962) by Jack Clayton.

Directed by Peter Medak, The Changeling tells the story of a pianist who, after the tragic death of his wife and daughter, retires to a lonely mansion and begins to experience supernatural occurrences linked to the house’s mysterious past and its previous owners. A number of parallels with The Others is evident. The action in both cases takes place in a haunted house. The supernatural events consist mostly of inexplicable noises and objects that seem to move on their own. In both cases, a tension grows between the house and its new owner. In both movies, a plot thread develops around a disturbing enigma. Other superficial details, such as the fact that the gardener in both cases has the same name (Mr. Tuttle) and that the new owner of the house is a pianist, further reinforce this connection. However, the most relevant influence of Medak’s film lies in its narrative and cinematic techniques. In both films, terror does not spring from what is explicitly shown or from special effects, but from what is merely suggested or glimpsed. Both movies pay special attention to the creation of a morbid and tense atmosphere that surrounds the characters who, though they attempt to solve the enigma rationally, are finally forced to accept a supernatural explanation for their mysterious circumstances. As ghost stories, both The Changeling and The Others are very effective, but both aim to achieve more than mere entertainment. The gothic plot is used as a departure point for exploring death and the feelings of loss and grief that accompany it, the determined search for truth in an atmosphere of mystery, the dubious and obscure nature of family values, and the constant struggle of conflicting ontologies. Other classic films about haunted houses, such as The Haunting (1962) or The Uninvited (1944), may have also influenced Amenábar’s work, but it is Medak’s film that seems to have made the strongest impression on the Spanish director (Juan-Navarro, Alejandro Amenábar 76–77; Rodríguez Marchante 198).

Jack Clayton’s The Innocents is another dominant intertext in The Others. Based on Henry James’ novel, the film is set in an isolated mansion, where a young governess is in charge of a pair of orphan children. Eerie apparitions and inexplicable behavior on the children’s part cause her to wonder about the house’s history, especially about the fate of the previous governess, Miss Jessel, and the former valet, Peter Quint. The Innocents is not a ghost story but a psychological thriller in which the complex consciousness of the female protagonist is analyzed. Although the governess’ struggle with the forces of evil seems to be real, the resul...